Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 24.88.96.129 (talk) at 18:52, 19 October 2008 (Fixed sentence fragment starting with "but"). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Template:Otheruses2

In the philosophy of time, four dimensionalism is a term sometimes used to refer to the view that the past, present and future are all equally real, and that (tenselessly) there exist dinosaurs, people and (if there will be such things) cities on Mars. These things don't exist now but they do exist, with the analogy often being that, if I am in London, New York doesn't exist here even though it does exist. It is to be contrasted with presentism. 'Four dimensionalism' is also sometimes used to refer to this view plus the B-Theory of time.

The term is sometimes used to refer instead to the view that objects persist by having temporal parts.

In Popular Culture

Four dimensionalism is a key concept in Kurt Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse-five. In the book, Tralfamadorians are an alien species that can see time.

External links

• Brown, C.L., 2006, "What is Space?" A philosophical, largely Wittgensteinian, approach towards a dissolution of the question: "What is space?"
• Rea, M. C., "Four Dimensionalism" in The Oxford Handbook for Metaphysics. Oxford Univ. Press. Describes presentism and four dimensionalism.

This philosophy-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• Philosophy of time
• Philosophy of physics
• Time
• Dimension
• Philosophy stubs